At the top of your screen you should see an ``Applications'' pull-down
menu. Use it to select ``Applications'' -> ``Internet'' ->
``Firefox''. You can also start Firefox from a Terminal window by
typing the command firefox &.

You should choose your mail client carefully. It is best to use only
one so your mail messages are not scattered among different computers.

When you get a departmental computer account, you will have a
departmental e-mail address. Usually, classes will send mail to this
account. So if you don't want your mail to end up in a departmental
mailbox, you need to set mail forwarding. See
Email..

Most students are already using a mail client. The popular ones are
web-based, such as ``gmail'' and ``umail''. To access them, you must
open a web browser first, of course. See above.

The full-featured Mozilla mail utility is called Thunderbird. To
start it, select Applications->Internet->Thunderbird or open a
terminal window and type the thunderbird & command. You will
need to configure it.

The Unix ``pine'' utility is also popular. It is not windows based,
but it can manage folders and handle attachments. To start pine,
select Applications->Internet->Email-pine or open a terminal window
and type the pine command.

The text editor of choice for this course is emacs. You can
start it by selecting Applications->Programming->emacs or by typing
the emacs & command in a terminal window. To start emacs
editing a file called foo, type emacs foo &. For more
about emacs see the brief
chapter
that takes
you through the basics.

The LibreOffice application understands and can edit simple Windows
documents. This includes Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Word
documents.

To run LibreOffice, select Application->Office->LibreOffice Writer
(for Word), Calc (for spreadsheets). You can also start it from a
terminal window by typing the command libreoffice &. If you
already have a Word file, say ``foo.docx'', you can open the document
from a terminal window with the command libreoffice foo.docx &.